Tetris Couldn't Win at This Gaming Ceremony — A New Category May Address This Issue
Each time a significant awards ceremony approaches, you'll find a demand to include additional classifications to acknowledge overlooked contributions and fill the passions of followers with niche passions.
Another commentator made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are board games, this being a dedicated supporter's campaign. But they will have to forgive me when I prioritize because like all dedicated enthusiasts, there's a strong justification for why my demand is the most urgent and important of all. The demand is this: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; it remains highly personal, and typically generate discussions and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. Yet it remains an essential concession for the industry of video games, that demonstrate such variety they barely qualify one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to have a chance for representation, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards currently feature award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, RPG experiences, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Together, these six categories actually cover a lot of ground, and you can find room for numerous titles.
Not so for brain-teasing titles. No suitable classification appears for their placement. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: building puzzles from a specific release, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Which classification works within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist excellent brain-teasers published annually lacking appropriate categories during gaming ceremonies, except when they manage to fit classification types such as Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated for anything in 2014
- A different innovative game missed out that year
- A beloved organization game was overlooked that year
- Only a few logic titles scraped into independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
These are often small games, but the art behind logic titles holds tremendous importance. Iconic mobile puzzle games rank among most popular titles globally maintaining this status for an extended period.
The legendary block-stacking game challenges famous sandbox experiences competing to become best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes as greatest title ever. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Puzzle games wouldn’t have such difficulty. It would be easy to populate a field of five interesting, varied, worthy titles annually without trouble — perhaps, with difficulty, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
To emphasize again, these are games lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators operate at the hard edge of video game design, producing among most fundamental forms of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.